Chapter 186: Other Cities, Other Ways
The timer was sitting at 22:43:12 when Mira got back to Titan Forge.
Several guild members had already gathered around the large screen in the common area, watching footage from the other cities. Nobody had organized this. They had just all ended up there, which was how things tended to happen at Titan Forge.
The current footage was the voting city.
A candidate was standing at a podium giving a speech to a large crowd. Behind them was a display showing live vote counts updating in real time.
One of the Titan Forge members crossed his arms. "That looks boring."
Another one nodded. "I’d rather just fight."
Mira sat down in one of the chairs and looked at the screen.
"Look closer," she said.
They looked at her. Then at the screen.
She pointed at the crowd. Not the candidate. The people watching. "Those people already know them. They’ve been watching these candidates for days. Listening to them. Deciding whether they actually believe what they’re saying." She kept looking at the screen. "Our city chose strength. They’re choosing trust."
One of the members said, "Which one is better?"
Mira shrugged. "Depends what your city needs."
The footage switched to the next city. The guild competition city. Dozens of guilds running operations simultaneously. Resource gathering, dungeon clears, logistics chains, support teams coordinating across districts.
One of the Titan Forge members leaned forward. "Now this feels more like it."
Mira was watching carefully. "Guilds aren’t just combat," she said. "Look at the support side. The ones winning the leaderboard aren’t the ones with the strongest fighters. They’re the ones with the best coordination."
The member who had said it looked boring was now paying closer attention.
"That city figured something out," Mira said.
...
In the training area at the other end of Titan Forge, Raze had commandeered a corner screen and was watching the free-for-all city’s footage with the full attention he usually reserved for actual dungeon preparation.
Thirty candidates in an arena. All active simultaneously. Alliances forming in the corners. Three people working together to take down a fourth and then immediately turning on the person beside them.
Raze started laughing. "That looks fun."
The hunter beside him said, "You’d lose."
Raze laughed harder. "Probably."
"You’d still try to take all thirty on at once."
"Of course," Raze said. "Still worth it."
Another hunter was watching the alliance in the northeast corner of the arena. "Who wins this? The strongest one?"
Raze watched. An enormous candidate with heavy armor was carving through everyone near them. But three smaller candidates had been quietly positioning themselves on the far side of the arena, staying out of the main conflict, letting everyone else exhaust themselves.
"Not the strongest," Raze said.
Everyone looked at him.
He pointed at the three quiet candidates. "The smartest."
Then the three quiet candidates suddenly charged, not each other, but the heavy armor candidate while their stamina was down.
The heavy armor candidate went down within thirty seconds.
The three turned on each other immediately after.
Raze whistled. "Never mind. Nobody knows."
He grinned. "I like that."
...
In the Research Guild, Lily and four of her colleagues had three separate screens running, each one on a different city, with notes open on every surface.
One researcher was tracking patterns across the methods. "No repetition," he said. "Every city we’ve seen so far has a completely different selection process."
Another was mapping dungeon clear rates against the city types. "The arena city has higher B-rank activity. The voting city has lower casualties."
Lily was looking at the full list they had compiled. Voting. Arena. Guild competition. Dungeon speed clear. Unknown.
"It’s collecting data," she said.
The room went quiet.
"The system isn’t just picking winners in each city," she said. "It’s testing which selection method produces the best Authority holder for each specific city context. Different cities. Different answers. It wants all of them."
Everyone started writing simultaneously.
One researcher looked up. "Which method is correct?"
Lily looked at the list. "Maybe all of them are. For the right city."
Another researcher said, "Then what’s it going to do with the data?"
Lily looked at the unknown city entry. Blank.
"I don’t know yet," she said.
She wrote that down too.
...
Mayor Ko was in the coordination building with three advisors. The streams from the other cities were running on the wall display. He had been watching for an hour without saying much.
One advisor said, "Should we have used public voting? Given citizens more direct input into the selection?"
Another said, "Or the guild competition model. Titan Forge and the other guilds could have been the vehicle for it."
Mayor Ko shook his head.
Both advisors waited.
"Our city needed hunters," he said. He looked at the voting city footage. "That city has had stable governance for a long time. Their candidates have years of public record. Their citizens can evaluate them meaningfully." He looked at the guild competition city. "That city has strong guild infrastructure and needed guilds to cooperate more than they were. The competition gave them a reason to." He looked at the screen showing Mythal’s recent candidate history. "We had gates appearing two months ago and no framework for anything. We needed to find out quickly who could actually handle what was coming."
He was quiet for a moment.
"The system understood what each city needed better than we did," he said.
Nobody argued with this.
...
Elden was in a small office with his notebook open.
He had been watching streams for two hours and had filled six pages.
He had drawn a simple grid across the current page. Each city’s method in a column. Pros and cons in rows below.
Voting. Pros: the winner has genuine community trust before they even begin. Cons: the process is slow and can favor popularity over capability.
Arena. Pros: identifies the strongest individual survivor clearly. Cons: high injury rate and the winner may be too depleted to function immediately after.
Guild competition. Pros: encourages large-scale cooperation and rewards organizational skill alongside combat skill. Cons: large established guilds have an inherent advantage that smaller cities wouldn’t have.
Dungeon speed clear. Pros: tests decision-making under real conditions rather than constructed ones. Cons: the outcome depends heavily on which dungeon is chosen.
He turned the page.
Unknown. He wrote nothing under pros or cons. Just a question mark.
He looked at the question mark for a moment.
"That’s the dangerous one," he said quietly, to nobody.
He closed the notebook on that page.
...
Across Mythal the timer kept running and people were doing what people did when they had twenty-two hours to fill and a significant event coming.
Children in one neighborhood had organized an impromptu recreation of the free-for-all arena fight, which lasted about four minutes before the rules became too disputed to continue. The debate about who had won took longer than the fight.
In a guild common room, four hunters were arguing about which city’s method was best. The argument had been going for forty minutes and had not produced a conclusion. Someone had drawn a ranking on a whiteboard. Free-for-all was at the top. Someone else had crossed it out and written voting. That had also been crossed out. The whiteboard now had six different rankings on it, none of them complete.
A forum thread had appeared asking which method Mythal should have used. It had twelve hundred replies within an hour, split across every possible position, with several sub-threads debating whether the voting city’s process would even work in a city that had only existed in its current form for two months.
Sora was covering all of it. She had six tabs open and was moving between them, providing commentary without taking strong positions, which was keeping her audience happy because everyone could find something to agree with.
At the back of her screen, just visible to careful viewers, the unknown city’s empty footage was still running. The platform that had held candidates and then had not.
Nobody in her chat had stopped mentioning it.
The timer ticked past 22:17:46 while all of this continued.
Different cities had made different choices. The voting city had chosen people they believed in. The arena city had chosen whoever survived. The guild city had chosen whoever built the best organization. The speed clear city had chosen whoever solved problems fastest.
Whatever the unknown city had done, nobody knew yet.
Comments